Posted by
michael
on from the i-get-to-play-sauron-no-me-me dept.
learithe writes "A new Middle Earth MMORPG,
Middle Earth Online, has just
been announced by Turbine, who produced Asheron's Call 1 and
2 with
Microsoft. It
looks to be just as pretty and cpu/graphics card intensive as
AC2. More
(flash-free) information can be found at
IGN and
Gamespy."
Doh! Must spend more money...
by
Ikeya
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Looks beautiful! This will be nice. I really like Middle Earth. It's a fun environment. After reading some of the books, watching the movies, playing the Lord of the Rings TCG and that kind of stuff, I've really grown to love Tolkien's Middle Earth. This sounds neat that not only will you have more character classes, but actually have different races in an RPG with building of race-specific buildings and stuff. Kudos! ikeya
-- ----
Move SIG...For great justice!
of course they will
by
jbellis
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
it's well established now that their target market is willing to pay both.
Re:Here's hoping
by
Karhgath
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I do believe that the market is now ready for a Permanent-Death MMORPG. I mean, the market is so full of similar games that a trully different and risky feature such as this might be what's needed to get a good share of the market.
Sure, making a PD game requires planning it from the start, making every features in a way that PD is possible for everyone to ENJOY. There are lot of problems to solve, and those are solvable on paper, and probably in practice. I just wish one publisher had the balls to really do it.
I wouldn't bet that Turbine will keep the PD, I'm sure they won't. This sucks. I just wish there were still risky companies around like Looking Glass were. Ion Storm isn't bad with Deus Ex and now the sequel, although they used Looking Glass' legacy to build Deus Ex on... While you can be successful and make great games without being overly original and risky(Blizzard), we still need risky ventures to revolutionize and advance toward new and greener pastures.
Oh well, don't mind me, the old skeptic gamer, but I'm sure the new middle earth will just be a 'standard' MMORPG with some new and unrisky features and the same old gameplay, with some tweak here and there, and more importantly, the Tolkien world! Wow, quite a change of setting...
Please, someone, bring Permanent Death and more risky idea to the world of MMORPG and then, maybe, maybe I'll actually play one.
Re:I want to be an Uruk-Hai!
by
Araxen
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
World of Warcraft says, "HI!"
How can the game mirror the book?
by
1337_h4x0r
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
In the book, you're going on a grand quest to save the Ring of Power from the clutches of Sauron.. in the game, you're going to be a peon, running around killing other equally useless peons. Same thing thats going to make Star Wars boring. Nobody can really be a Jedi or they'd be unstoppable.. similarly, there's only one Gandalf and only one Ring of Power, so as an MMORPG I don't see how it'll work.
Re:Here's hoping
by
DNS-and-BIND
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
One thing I really like about Middle-Earth is how few Wizards there are, and how they're not using wizardly powers to heat their coffee, unicorn horns to "burn off" drunkenness, and other idiot things that are so prevalent in other crappy pulp fantasy fiction. I can count on one hand the number of times Gandalf used magic.
Too bad they're dumbing down the game in order to appeal to the masses. It'll be just like every other game out there, only with Official Middle-Earth Theme[tm].
-- Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Re:Here's hoping
by
Karhgath
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
You are one of the many who do not think really about a PD system as a new beast completely. A PD game cannot just be EverQuest with PD added just like that. Everything, the whole game - economics, character advancement, features, etc. - everything must be built from the ground up to be Perma-Death. It's not as simple as adding PD or creating a PD server, as this will just fail and won't be useful at all. There is a real challenge of doing a PD game, and much reward I think.
However, for that, people must lose they preconceived ideas about permanent-death. I think I'll start the PDAA (PD Awareness Association). =)
Re:Will they double charge?
by
Jason1729
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
How about giving me the option to play the game without having to pay for a useless box and manual that I don't have the shelf space for? All I need is the CD. For a simple CD in a Jewel case they could charge the price of the first month's service and include a month of service. If they did that, I'd have played several MMORPGs by now. Instead, I've never even tried one.
I've bought all 3 WarCraft games and StarCraft, and they're my favourite games since the Sierra adventure games. WoW looks like it will be the best one yet, but I refuse to buy into that model on principle, and I am definately their target audience, I still spend about 10 hours/week playing WC3.
WHy this will suck
by
AuMatar
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Camping Sauron for the one ring drop. No better way to ruin Middle Earth than to have to sit and wait for the ultimate evil to spawn, and staying there for a few days.
--
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Re:Here's hoping
by
DunbarTheInept
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The problem with permanent death is that first the game engine has to be at *least* as fair as a compenent human gamemaster would be in a tabletop RPG. And that just isn't the case. When you can die because of bugs, or network lag times, and things like that, that's when permanent death just isn't fair. And if you think permanent death is somehow true-to-form for middle earth, NO it isn't. Gandalf was ressurected as The White. Sauron died by Isildur's hand - but no not really. And the author's hand was in there making sure none of the characters who needed to live for the plot ended up dying, even though there were many cases where they easily would have.
If Lord of the Rings had been an MMORPG with permanent death, then Frodo would have died from the wraith's wound before reaching Rivendell and the whole story would have ended right there. The "he almost died but barely pulled through" story element that happens a lot in Tolkien wouldn't work if a computer was calling the shots.
--
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
A question on their "marketing"
by
narfbot
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Why is Vivendi Universal Games making a game on the Tolkien world, when one of their subsidiaries is already been making a similar fantasy type for roughly nearly three years, World of Warcraft? Even then, why do they have the same target frame, 2004 right? I think being practically, the same kind of game, a customer will usually choose one over the other, and not buy the other. This means one of these games will largely fail. I think WoW will be the successful one as it will be more polished with the development time that has gone in. So these games are virtually competing against each other.
Even after that, there are many MMOPG games in production. I don't think they will be too many successful ones because a gamer has only so much money to spend on monthly fees, but more important time. A single MMOPG can consume much of your free time.
So I really doubt the success of Middle Earth Online.
Re:I want to be an Uruk-Hai!
by
nunofgs
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
[OFF-TOPIC] (a bit)
that was one of the things I found completely stupid in the second movie btw... millions or gazillions of uruk-hai (u couldn't even see the end of them), all of them with super-human/super-elf strength and smarter than orc, and faster, and shoot stinging foam from their eyes (ok, ok, I'll get to the point)... against 100 or so elfs with bows! Gimli who is too fat to even pick up an Axe, JUMPS (or gets tossed) into the middle of all those uruk-hai (did I mention they had weapons too?) and he doesn't die!!! c'mon!!! one uruk-hai could kill gimli and all his clones!
Re:Here's hoping
by
DunbarTheInept
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
One thing a game has to have before you can even consider PD is real consequential results from your actions. In the real world, if you just kill someone out in the street with witnesses and take his stuff, you're not going to get away with it, and your life as a free man will be pretty much over. Consequences like that have to exist in the MMORPG or PD isn't going to be fair. (Hey, let's go beat up on some newbies for a while...)
--
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
When Turbine demo'ed thier Turbine Game Engine, they demonstrated how flexible it was to script and how dynamic they could make the games.
They came up with an example set of inputs to thier engine and called it Asheron's Call 2. Thier engine is beautiful, thier game design is shit.
So, what people should be hoping is that thier game designers (and artists) [where is devilmouse?] don't drop the ball and make a game worth playing. It *could* give EQ2 a run for its money.
Suppose they actually put the ring into this story. Suppose a hero retrieves it. Suppose the game engine actually gives the character a huge boost.
Do you think there's any chance of the ring's destruction in Mount Doom?
--
-Dave
Re:Will they double charge?
by
Jason1729
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Then why don't I have to pay AOL a huge upfront fee to buy their disc since they put so much dev work into all their new versions? AOL's monthly fee is only double the cost of most of the online games, and they have to pay for phonelines to provide a dial up connection plus the backend connection, and they offer a lot of their own content that has to be paid for.
It costs a lot more to build a cellular phone network than make a video game, and yet the cell companies will allow me to connect to their networks without paying a startup fee to offset the costs to build their network. If I don't have a phone that will work with their network, they'll even provide me with one at a heavily subsidized price, or even for free.
Earthlink's email station hardware is free even though it must cost them the first 6 months of your service cost.
These companies and most others understand that their main revenue stream is from the service. Initial costs such as activation fees or hardware and software costs are barriers to people becoming customers and that is a bad thing.
What is better for the software company: if 100,000 people buy the software for $30 and 50% decide to keep the account for a year at $10/month, or 2 million people sign up for free and just 10% keep their accounts for a year? That's exactly why barriers are bad; even if you have a lower turnover rate, you still have less total customers
Re:WineX our only hope of playing this game in Lin
by
feldsteins
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
OpenGL or not, no game developer has much of an incentive to port a game to Linux. Why? Because every Linux user who gives a hoot about gaming dual boots Windows. Think about it. You're a game developer. You can either:
a) not develop for Linux, pocket the savings, sell a million games.
b) incur the expense of developing/testing/supporting for Linux and sell...zero additional units.
At least doing a Mac port involves getting sales that you flatly would not otherwise have gotten. Mac users are not dual booting Windows for the purposes of playing games. You don't make a mac version, you don't sell to the Mac user. Simple.
-- You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
Re:Here's hoping
by
ProppaT
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm hoping, just hoping, that all you PD well wishers get your wish. You'll get your shiny new cd-rom with your brand new, PD encompasing MMORPG!! You'll install it and start playing it...and here's what you'll find:
First few days: At first it'll be great. You'll die a couple of times at lower levels figuring out the game, but that's the learning curve.
First week: Your level 10 Super Shadow Slayer thingie dies. You actually put REAL hours into this character. You curse that class and pick another, disgusted that, "due to a bug in the game" (or your favorite excuse), you died. Figure you'll be more careful next time.
First month: You're level 20! Wow! However, now you've invested REAL time into your character. You start worrying about "loosing everything." You make sure that you choose your battles. You make sure you'll ALWAYS win.
Second month: The game has turned purely social. All you do is talk to guild mates, plan a strategy for possibly killing the a dragon in some cave somewhere...however, no one actually wants to follow through with the plan because no one wants to die! Everyone maxes out their trade skills and makes the best weapons and armor in the game to show who has the biggest...umm, sword. Yeah, that's it...
Third Month: Everyone gets up the balls to go into the dungeon. 2 people out of 30 die. Those people get super pissed off. They blame the cleric for not healing them, the warrior for not taking damage for them. They might be right. The point is, they trusted someone with their life and they were failed. They cause a tear in the guild, the guild disbands. Disgruntled players quit the game.
You see the point. People don't want to risk what they've invested, literally, days, weeks, even MONTHS of their life on. There's always the potential to die! We're not playing marbles...you're gonna loose more than your aggie.
What it boils down to is that you're eventually going to have to place your life in the hands of others. Yeah, that's great roleplaying I suppose...but there's a difference between pen and paper RPG's and a computer game. There HAS to be a difference! No computer can ever take the place of a skilled DM. So why even try to attempt it?
Bottom line is, if you're gonna have PD you're going to have on of the following....
1) A game full of utter chaos
2) A game full of heroes that NEVER die
3) A game full of very nervous and distrustful people
4) A game that's pace is so absolutely slow that only the most hardcore RPGer's are going to want to play it
-or-
5) A game that is 1% fighting, 99% social interaction, tradeskills, and errand based quests
Option #5 is the only viable PD option IMO
Why not just play Neverwinter Nights, a game where there actually IS a DM?
-- Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
Turbine's Last Stand
by
JJahn
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
This is the game for Turbine. With the recent horror that is AC2, and AC1 only being a mildly sucessful game business-wise, this is their last chance to prove themselves as an MMORPG developer.
Of course this game is not published by MS, so if it turns out well I guess it is proof that MS was at fault for AC2 being crap like it is now.
Re:Here's hoping
by
DunbarTheInept
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Frodo pulled through, beside his very mortal constitution, because of the application of what you might call magic.
Yes, but put it in terms of a computer game with hit points or some other such damage mechanism. To make Frodo's player really *feel* that notion that Frodo almost died, Frodo has to be down to scant hit points left. And then the difference between him dying and him living is a mere matter of typing speed and how on-the-ball the players of the elves at Rivendell are. "Oh, darn, I made a typo and that slowed me down enough that Frodo is dead. Darn Darn Darn! Oh, man I'm so sorry. Now who's gonna be able to carry the evil artifact."
My point is that in a GAME, you can't really have too many near-death scenes before one becomes an actual-death scene. In a game with fair rules mechanics, you are just as likely to fail in a 50/50 situation as live. This is not really how novels like LOTR work. In a novel, you die if the author things it makes sense to happen there. Senseless, plot-setting-back deaths don't happen. But realisticly, they would.
I'm not saying a PK MMORPG can't work at all - but there's no way in hell it will be as grandiose a story as LOTR. To make your character likely to live, you would avoid the quests where the odds are heavily against you, like, oh, say, two low level newbie halflings walking to the heavily armed enemy-held zone and chucking the world's most powerful artifact into a volocano mere days march from the enemy's main stronghold.
--
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Slashdot Mirror
Looks beautiful! This will be nice. I really like Middle Earth. It's a fun environment. After reading some of the books, watching the movies, playing the Lord of the Rings TCG and that kind of stuff, I've really grown to love Tolkien's Middle Earth.
This sounds neat that not only will you have more character classes, but actually have different races in an RPG with building of race-specific buildings and stuff.
Kudos!
ikeya
---- Move SIG...For great justice!
it's well established now that their target market is willing to pay both.
I do believe that the market is now ready for a Permanent-Death MMORPG. I mean, the market is so full of similar games that a trully different and risky feature such as this might be what's needed to get a good share of the market.
Sure, making a PD game requires planning it from the start, making every features in a way that PD is possible for everyone to ENJOY. There are lot of problems to solve, and those are solvable on paper, and probably in practice. I just wish one publisher had the balls to really do it.
I wouldn't bet that Turbine will keep the PD, I'm sure they won't. This sucks. I just wish there were still risky companies around like Looking Glass were. Ion Storm isn't bad with Deus Ex and now the sequel, although they used Looking Glass' legacy to build Deus Ex on... While you can be successful and make great games without being overly original and risky(Blizzard), we still need risky ventures to revolutionize and advance toward new and greener pastures.
Oh well, don't mind me, the old skeptic gamer, but I'm sure the new middle earth will just be a 'standard' MMORPG with some new and unrisky features and the same old gameplay, with some tweak here and there, and more importantly, the Tolkien world! Wow, quite a change of setting...
Please, someone, bring Permanent Death and more risky idea to the world of MMORPG and then, maybe, maybe I'll actually play one.
World of Warcraft says, "HI!"
In the book, you're going on a grand quest to save the Ring of Power from the clutches of Sauron.. in the game, you're going to be a peon, running around killing other equally useless peons. Same thing thats going to make Star Wars boring. Nobody can really be a Jedi or they'd be unstoppable.. similarly, there's only one Gandalf and only one Ring of Power, so as an MMORPG I don't see how it'll work.
Too bad they're dumbing down the game in order to appeal to the masses. It'll be just like every other game out there, only with Official Middle-Earth Theme[tm].
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
You are one of the many who do not think really about a PD system as a new beast completely. A PD game cannot just be EverQuest with PD added just like that. Everything, the whole game - economics, character advancement, features, etc. - everything must be built from the ground up to be Perma-Death. It's not as simple as adding PD or creating a PD server, as this will just fail and won't be useful at all. There is a real challenge of doing a PD game, and much reward I think.
However, for that, people must lose they preconceived ideas about permanent-death. I think I'll start the PDAA (PD Awareness Association). =)
How about giving me the option to play the game without having to pay for a useless box and manual that I don't have the shelf space for? All I need is the CD. For a simple CD in a Jewel case they could charge the price of the first month's service and include a month of service. If they did that, I'd have played several MMORPGs by now. Instead, I've never even tried one.
I've bought all 3 WarCraft games and StarCraft, and they're my favourite games since the Sierra adventure games. WoW looks like it will be the best one yet, but I refuse to buy into that model on principle, and I am definately their target audience, I still spend about 10 hours/week playing WC3.
Jason
ProfQuotes
Camping Sauron for the one ring drop. No better way to ruin Middle Earth than to have to sit and wait for the ultimate evil to spawn, and staying there for a few days.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
The problem with permanent death is that first the game engine has to be at *least* as fair as a compenent human gamemaster would be in a tabletop RPG. And that just isn't the case. When you can die because of bugs, or network lag times, and things like that, that's when permanent death just isn't fair. And if you think permanent death is somehow true-to-form for middle earth, NO it isn't. Gandalf was ressurected as The White. Sauron died by Isildur's hand - but no not really. And the author's hand was in there making sure none of the characters who needed to live for the plot ended up dying, even though there were many cases where they easily would have.
If Lord of the Rings had been an MMORPG with permanent death, then Frodo would have died from the wraith's wound before reaching Rivendell and the whole story would have ended right there. The "he almost died but barely pulled through" story element that happens a lot in Tolkien wouldn't work if a computer was calling the shots.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Why is Vivendi Universal Games making a game on the Tolkien world, when one of their subsidiaries is already been making a similar fantasy type for roughly nearly three years, World of Warcraft? Even then, why do they have the same target frame, 2004 right? I think being practically, the same kind of game, a customer will usually choose one over the other, and not buy the other. This means one of these games will largely fail. I think WoW will be the successful one as it will be more polished with the development time that has gone in. So these games are virtually competing against each other.
Even after that, there are many MMOPG games in production. I don't think they will be too many successful ones because a gamer has only so much money to spend on monthly fees, but more important time. A single MMOPG can consume much of your free time.
So I really doubt the success of Middle Earth Online.
[OFF-TOPIC] (a bit)
that was one of the things I found completely stupid in the second movie btw... millions or gazillions of uruk-hai (u couldn't even see the end of them), all of them with super-human/super-elf strength and smarter than orc, and faster, and shoot stinging foam from their eyes (ok, ok, I'll get to the point)... against 100 or so elfs with bows! Gimli who is too fat to even pick up an Axe, JUMPS (or gets tossed) into the middle of all those uruk-hai (did I mention they had weapons too?) and he doesn't die!!! c'mon!!! one uruk-hai could kill gimli and all his clones!
One thing a game has to have before you can even consider PD is real consequential results from your actions. In the real world, if you just kill someone out in the street with witnesses and take his stuff, you're not going to get away with it, and your life as a free man will be pretty much over. Consequences like that have to exist in the MMORPG or PD isn't going to be fair. (Hey, let's go beat up on some newbies for a while...)
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
When Turbine demo'ed thier Turbine Game Engine, they demonstrated how flexible it was to script and how dynamic they could make the games.
They came up with an example set of inputs to thier engine and called it Asheron's Call 2. Thier engine is beautiful, thier game design is shit.
So, what people should be hoping is that thier game designers (and artists) [where is devilmouse?] don't drop the ball and make a game worth playing. It *could* give EQ2 a run for its money.
Suppose they actually put the ring into this story. Suppose a hero retrieves it. Suppose the game engine actually gives the character a huge boost.
Do you think there's any chance of the ring's destruction in Mount Doom?
-Dave
Then why don't I have to pay AOL a huge upfront fee to buy their disc since they put so much dev work into all their new versions? AOL's monthly fee is only double the cost of most of the online games, and they have to pay for phonelines to provide a dial up connection plus the backend connection, and they offer a lot of their own content that has to be paid for.
It costs a lot more to build a cellular phone network than make a video game, and yet the cell companies will allow me to connect to their networks without paying a startup fee to offset the costs to build their network. If I don't have a phone that will work with their network, they'll even provide me with one at a heavily subsidized price, or even for free.
Earthlink's email station hardware is free even though it must cost them the first 6 months of your service cost.
These companies and most others understand that their main revenue stream is from the service. Initial costs such as activation fees or hardware and software costs are barriers to people becoming customers and that is a bad thing.
What is better for the software company: if 100,000 people buy the software for $30 and 50% decide to keep the account for a year at $10/month, or 2 million people sign up for free and just 10% keep their accounts for a year? That's exactly why barriers are bad; even if you have a lower turnover rate, you still have less total customers
Jason
ProfQuotes
OpenGL or not, no game developer has much of an incentive to port a game to Linux. Why? Because every Linux user who gives a hoot about gaming dual boots Windows. Think about it. You're a game developer. You can either:
a) not develop for Linux, pocket the savings, sell a million games.
b) incur the expense of developing/testing/supporting for Linux and sell...zero additional units.
At least doing a Mac port involves getting sales that you flatly would not otherwise have gotten. Mac users are not dual booting Windows for the purposes of playing games. You don't make a mac version, you don't sell to the Mac user. Simple.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
I'm hoping, just hoping, that all you PD well wishers get your wish. You'll get your shiny new cd-rom with your brand new, PD encompasing MMORPG!! You'll install it and start playing it...and here's what you'll find:
First few days: At first it'll be great. You'll die a couple of times at lower levels figuring out the game, but that's the learning curve.
First week: Your level 10 Super Shadow Slayer thingie dies. You actually put REAL hours into this character. You curse that class and pick another, disgusted that, "due to a bug in the game" (or your favorite excuse), you died. Figure you'll be more careful next time.
First month: You're level 20! Wow! However, now you've invested REAL time into your character. You start worrying about "loosing everything." You make sure that you choose your battles. You make sure you'll ALWAYS win.
Second month: The game has turned purely social. All you do is talk to guild mates, plan a strategy for possibly killing the a dragon in some cave somewhere...however, no one actually wants to follow through with the plan because no one wants to die! Everyone maxes out their trade skills and makes the best weapons and armor in the game to show who has the biggest...umm, sword. Yeah, that's it...
Third Month: Everyone gets up the balls to go into the dungeon. 2 people out of 30 die. Those people get super pissed off. They blame the cleric for not healing them, the warrior for not taking damage for them. They might be right. The point is, they trusted someone with their life and they were failed. They cause a tear in the guild, the guild disbands. Disgruntled players quit the game.
You see the point. People don't want to risk what they've invested, literally, days, weeks, even MONTHS of their life on. There's always the potential to die! We're not playing marbles...you're gonna loose more than your aggie.
What it boils down to is that you're eventually going to have to place your life in the hands of others. Yeah, that's great roleplaying I suppose...but there's a difference between pen and paper RPG's and a computer game. There HAS to be a difference! No computer can ever take the place of a skilled DM. So why even try to attempt it?
Bottom line is, if you're gonna have PD you're going to have on of the following.... 1) A game full of utter chaos 2) A game full of heroes that NEVER die 3) A game full of very nervous and distrustful people 4) A game that's pace is so absolutely slow that only the most hardcore RPGer's are going to want to play it -or- 5) A game that is 1% fighting, 99% social interaction, tradeskills, and errand based quests
Option #5 is the only viable PD option IMO
Why not just play Neverwinter Nights, a game where there actually IS a DM?
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
Of course this game is not published by MS, so if it turns out well I guess it is proof that MS was at fault for AC2 being crap like it is now.
Frodo pulled through, beside his very mortal constitution, because of the application of what you might call magic.
Yes, but put it in terms of a computer game with hit points or some other such damage mechanism. To make Frodo's player really *feel* that notion that Frodo almost died, Frodo has to be down to scant hit points left. And then the difference between him dying and him living is a mere matter of typing speed and how on-the-ball the players of the elves at Rivendell are. "Oh, darn, I made a typo and that slowed me down enough that Frodo is dead. Darn Darn Darn! Oh, man I'm so sorry. Now who's
gonna be able to carry the evil artifact."
My point is that in a GAME, you can't really have too many near-death scenes before one becomes an actual-death scene. In a game with fair rules mechanics, you are just as likely to fail in a 50/50 situation as live. This is not really how novels like LOTR work. In a novel, you die if the author things it makes sense to happen there. Senseless, plot-setting-back deaths don't happen. But realisticly, they would.
I'm not saying a PK MMORPG can't work at all - but there's no way in hell it will be as grandiose a story as LOTR. To make your character likely to live, you would avoid the quests where the odds are heavily against you, like, oh, say, two low level newbie halflings walking to the heavily armed enemy-held zone and chucking the world's most powerful artifact into a volocano mere days march from the enemy's main stronghold.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.